Friday, May 9, 2014

Being Real

While technology is ruling our lives, we have also become numbers and dots on excel sheets, graphs and infographics.
What they call Big Data.

Marketing teams are chasing big data, cutting and dissecting it into slices and pies.
Innovating, inventing, redefining, creating and communicating to these numbers and dots.

And doing it successfully.
Most of the time.

But how fast does big data on consumer lives' get refreshed?
Does it tell the florist that someone's mother has just passed away and that it is extremely painful to get texts asking her to send her mum a Happy Mother's Day card?
Does it tell the retailer that the couple they send an anniversary gift card every year have split up in extremely painful circumstances?
What about the emailers from the sneaker brand to a person who has just lost both his legs in an accident?
Or the message to the fatally ill patient about making her family happy by going on that vacation this summer?

The friendly manager of the well know shoe brand ,back home, however, did know all of this.
So did the owner of the local sweet shop.
The doctor in the town hospital.
The family jeweler.
The priest.
The postman.

For them their customers were names.
Real people with families who rolled along life's roller coaster.
They knew how to console, cajole, persuade.
People they had conversations with.

Empathy.
Connect.
This made them what they were.

Connecting with consumers is not just about blindly carpet bombing emailers and texts.
And appearing to be the friendly brand that cares.

It is about finding out ways of connections.
It is about behaving like real people do.